When I began researching Rachel’s story, I had a good idea of what was coming. What I didn’t realize was just how much Jacob (and Rachel by her connection to him) would struggle throughout their lives. Jacob’s very name means “heel grabber,” or “deceiver”—as if he was born with a bent toward seeking his own way, always grappling for what he desired.
When Jacob was old, and many years after he had laid both Rachel and Leah to rest, he was quoted as saying to Pharaoh, “My years have been few and difficult” (Gen. 47:9). I would say that is a bit of an understatement! Earlier in Genesis, God said to Jacob, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome” (32:28). Jacob knew struggle even in the womb.
And Rachel knew struggle from the moment her wedding night was stolen from her and given to her sister. I cannot even begin to imagine the heartache that must have held for her. I do believe that Jacob and Rachel wanted and intended to marry only each other. Here was a man who wanted a monogamous marriage and ended up with forced polygamy. Sometimes life dishes out things we would not choose.
In this version of Rachel’s story, I gave Rachel and Leah different mothers in order to set up the earlier conflict and to give Laban an even deeper reason for possibly wanting to deceive Jacob. Perhaps Laban was jealous of the love Jacob had for his daughter. Perhaps he was just consumed by his own greed. In any case, the Bible is silent on the mothers of Rachel and Leah; their creation is my own.
The struggles Rachel and Leah carried in sharing a husband, however, were theirs. The Bible gives us a good glimpse of just how personal things got in the names Leah chose for her sons and in Rachel’s bitter cry that she would die if she could not bear children! I wonder if Jacob didn’t feel rather like a pawn in some childbearing chess game.
My favorite part of this story, though, is not in the struggles of the women over their want of children or over Jacob’s love, but of the struggle Jacob faced when he wrestled with God. Have you ever carried fear as long as he did? While he surely stuffed the fears and guilt aside to live his life, Jacob never quite forgot what he had done to his brother, and he did not know peace at a heart level until he settled the matter (and many more matters, I’m sure) with God alone.
And isn’t that the way it is for each of us? Life is filled with struggles, some nearly impossible to bear. We grapple and fight and flee and live with guilt, and yet what our hearts are longing for is restoration and reconciliation. For Jacob, that meant facing his brother. For Rachel, it meant realizing that God was more important to her than raising children, and it meant coming to some sense of peace with her sister. I’d like to think Rachel and Leah were friends in the end.
That’s not to say that all relationships can be restored. We can live at peace with men only as far as it concerns us. And Esau was not a man Jacob could trust. He was a man Jacob could forgive and seek forgiveness from. Still, in the end, they went their separate ways.
Someday, when Jesus (Yeshua) reigns on earth, all things will be fully restored. But until then, we, like Jacob and Rachel, will struggle. And sometimes we will wrestle with God’s best for us.
Like Jacob, I hope we can come away from such encounters changed and yet blessed.
In His Grace,
Jill Eileen Smith